The Whitest Bands Alive
In which I make a case for three albums from 2006 that unfortunately shaped me as a writer
Good morning. Today I want to tell you about some of my favorite albums. The thing is, these albums are all already reasonably well-known and liked, so this isn’t going to be the usual thing of pitching some music to you that you probably haven’t heard yet. Instead, I want to dig into the context around these albums and try to figure out why I feel like they’re kind of misunderstood… as pieces of art. As annoying and pretentious as that sounds.
I have to give you some personal context here, too, which is that these were all albums I first heard as a pre-teen, which means of course that I’m naturally predisposed towards liking them, in some Freudian way. But I will also say that of all the music I got into at the time (and I was about as avid a music-listener as you could be at age 14, which in 2010 meant hoarding the “free download” cards from Starbucks—I didn’t know about Limewire yet), these are the albums that have stuck with me into adulthood. I still listen to them all the time, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. On the contrary, they’ve unfolded for me as I’ve gotten older: I can hear into the craft more, I have a better sense of what the lyrics are trying to do, I can appreciate the arrangements and the mixing.
Is it possible that I just like listening to this music because it reminds me of the “simpler time” that was my adolescence? Maybe. I actually think it might be for the opposite reason: my adolescence was not particularly simple, or easy, and music was one place I turned to for escapism, and to feel like there was something outside of the stresses of the real world.
But there’s something more to it: these three albums are inextricably linked in my mind for some reason—maybe because they all came out within two years of each other, although I encountered them later. I think there was a bit of a quiet revolution going on in music in the mid-2000s, which eventually led into to the last real era of monocultural rock ‘n roll in the early 2010s and things got very boring-sounding for a while. But before all that, something interesting was going on.
What albums are we talking about here? Dreams by The Whitest Boy Alive, a German-Norwegian band you may not have heard of, but you’ve probably heard on a Spotify playlist in a cafe somewhere. Alphabetical by Phoenix, who you’ve almost certainly heard of, as they were part of rock music’s (somewhat wimpy) last attempt at world domination a few years later—although you might not know this record, which came out before all that. And Sean Lennon’s (yes, that Lennon) album Friendly Fire, which I will now argue is an underrated masterpiece whose melodic heights rival Figure 8’s. Underrated? Maybe I mean understated.
That’s the thing that unites these three, more than anything else (more than their black-and-white album covers): if you’re not paying attention, there are things that will go right by you. At no point does any of this music hit you over the head with anything, except maybe its sheer smoothness. I’m going to now embarrass myself by telling you about how that smoothness might have come about, and why it’s actually quite subversive and interesting (but ultimately wasn’t understood by audiences, who don’t know anything).
Let’s talk about Dreams.
Let’s start with that name, because it really is the elephant in the room. Why on earth would you name your band “The Whitest Boy Alive?” You could say that at least it’s memorable, but I really don’t think it’s done them any favors, in America at least, where talking about race quickly sends people into fits. In Europe, though, I think this name played out differently. The WBA’s lead singer and songwriter is Erlend Oye of the other quite famous band Kings of Convenience, who put out a documentary recently. Watching the documentary, I had the sense that Erlend was still in open rebellion against his cultural upbringing in Norway, where (even as we Americans think of the Nordic countries as progressive) there is immense pressure to conform, to be the same as everyone else. Certainly, not to start a rock band with a bunch of Germans with lyrics in English. I suspect the band name, and the overall thrust of the music was a provocation and a bit of a rebellion against that central-European conformity; a way of calling out the cultural bankruptcy of modern Europe’s supposedly more enlightened societies, while also being a bit self-deprecating so as not to come on too strong.
Apparently the songs are all written in-character as the titular “whitest boy,” described as a “naive, shy northern European boy” who the lyrics are in fact kind of mocking (hence the self-deprecation). Here’s the first bit of “Golden Cage”:
“So you no longer care if there’s another day / I guess I have been there, I guess I am there now.
You knew what you wanted and you fought so hard / Just to find yourself sitting in a golden cage”
I read this “golden cage” business as just what it feels like to be stuck in a society where everyone is provided for, but no one wants to break the status quo. Which makes the “this city’s no longer mine / there’s sadness written on every corner” hit harder when it comes around in the bridge, because it speaks not just to the fictional relationship in the song but the underlying feeling of alienation. It’s another case where if you’re not paying attention, the song seems like it’s just about a relationship, but I think what’s going on here is more that the breakup—real or fictional—that is implied to have happened throughout the album is more of a device to obscure the real subject of Erlend’s critique, which is the suffocating, overprivileged society around him: “So many people telling me one way / So many people telling me to stay”. At this point “caught in a motion that I don’t want to stop” feels like a quiet, very personal revolution against the overwhelming force of, well, if not neoliberalism, then at least the status quo.
You can say I’m reading too much into this, but check out that documentary—which is incredibly funny and watchable, by the way—and tell me Erlend doesn’t know what he’s up to here: the album as a whole feels like a very barbed, acerbic takedown of the boringness of his alienating childhood. I think that’s what I connected with when I was fourteen, and it still speaks to me now. It’s a pretty powerful message, but it’s subtle enough (and the music is subdued enough) that you could easily miss it, or mistake it for a barbed, acerbic takedown of an ex, which is what I think most people get from it, if they engage with the lyrics at all.1
Speaking of the music, the music on this album is fascinating to me: I don’t think anyone has ever done anything like it before or since. The premise was that the band would play dance music with real instruments, which at that time was a fairly original idea. But what distinguished this band, ironically, was how not white they were, at least as a rhythm section. If a bunch of Germans playing electronic-sounding music was ever this funky before, I have never heard about it. It seems like the band was smart enough to know that they were on to something when they ditched computer beats for a real drummer, and that the looseness of the human groove was something to lean into instead of trying to hide.
I honestly don’t think anyone has ever committed this hard to actually playing something live that sounds like “dance music” in the intervening years. These takes on the album sound 99% live! And they were supposedly recording in a shitty converted garage. The whole thing is as DIY as you please, and IMO the lo-fi-ness is charming, and works in favor of the no-frills aesthetic. And because the band focused on limitation and what they could actually pull off in the room, they accidentally hit on the kind of economical arranging that made 60s records so fucking good (in this case, Erlend has said the primary inspiration was the Talking Heads’ first album—well, same thing).
So anyway that came out in 2006 and then a few years later I, the American teenager, discovered it on Pandora (remember that old thing?) and it became one of my favorite albums. Along with…
Phoenix’s Alphabetical is a much weirder album in a lot of ways. I think despite Phoenix being the bigger name (definitely the biggest one here), pretty much no one has heard this record outside of its biggest single, Everything is Everything, which most people regard as an attempt to recapture the heights of their “breakthrough single” “If I Ever Feel Better”. Actually, I’m not sure that “most people” really think about this stuff at all. I think I just read that in a review somewhere, but I can’t find it now.
According to the band, this album was “pure pain” to record. Critics praised it for sounding “smooth,” but I think through that smoothness you can hear the obsessive perfectionism that made this record so hard to make (and ultimately yielded Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which is an album that only obsessive perfectionism could have produced. Yes, I am criticizing that album for being too perfect). Everything did get somewhat sanded down (read: the tops were lopped off, the peaks compressed) in mixing, but you can still hear something underneath that I find very interesting, which is a rawness that Phoenix basically never explored again.
By rawness I mean: close-miced acoustic guitars that are weirdly ahead of their time in how lo-fi and bedroom-y they sound, especially right up against the half-drum machine, half-live kit beat. And the live drums, when they do appear, are kind of messy and unhinged, then reeled in with a compressor to make them work in the mix. The alchemy of that together with the gridded-out (but also a bit Dilla-influenced) drum machine still feels futuristic to me. Listen to the last 30 seconds of Victim of the Crime (maybe one of my favorite 30 seconds of music) and check out that crazy delay throw when the live drums come in in the instrumental outro. While you’re at it, listen to this live version and hear how the band was still thinking like a rock band even as they veered further into production-land. There was an interesting tension here between the live band-ness and the electronic stuff that never fully was resolved on this record, and it’s all the better (if less commercially viable) for it.
And let’s talk about the lyrics. Here’s my crackpot theory about this album: I think Phoenix had a hit with their first album, United, and were in a panic trying to follow it up with something they could really be proud of, all while under label pressure to deliver of course. At the same time, they were in their late twenties, the age when, if you’re anything like me, you start to figure out how the world works and get just a little bit wiser to the workings of the music industry. The songs here are existential, and actively angry, which goes with the sonic rawness and is also something you won’t really hear anywhere else on their discography. “I’m An Actor” is a pretty savage evisceration of, well, what it is to be a celebrity: “I want things to be done by someone who’s taking care of me / I don’t even care for me / I just care about what you think of me.” And that moderately big hit “Everything is Everything” is basically just a litany of early-adult anxieties, how paralyzing it can be to realize that every choice you make will affect you forever, and how even when things are going well you feel like a fraud: “Can’t understand a word / half of the stuff I’m saying.” The songs’ protagonist seems to hate himself, and is lashing out at everyone and everything (“you’re the victim of the crime”), but it’s all tastefully concealed with funky, electronic-adjacent grooves of the kind that only a French rock band could produce (at least, the French also gave us Daft Punk and Air. I think that’s what I meant by that).
Just to pivot for a moment here, I read an interview a few years ago with UK-based musician Brian Christinzo of BC Camplight, who was talking about that time he was quite literally exiled in Paris while waiting for his UK visa to come through. Being stuck in Paris may not sound so bad, but he said of his time there: “Paris really does not jive with me at all … I see all these people, their aesthetic is great and they’re so fashionable and they’re all walking in the same way … and I think, ‘Jesus Christ, doesn’t anybody hate themselves in this place?’” (I’ve been to Paris once, and I came away with a similar impression.)
Back in 2004, making Alphabetical, I wonder if this was the kind of conformity that Phoenix, or at least Thomas Mars, was reacting to. He certainly seems to be reacting to something! You might say, “OK Foster, rock musicians rebelling against the society they grew up in? What an original take!”
But it’s not the rebellion itself that I’m interested in here; it’s how concealed it is, both here and in Dreams. The writing has a kind of arch thing about it, where you have to be a little bit in the know to get that it’s taking the piss. Which you might find annoying, but I really like. I think it’s great. And I’m especially into how the lyrics seem really interested in the contradictions of life, and how confused you can get when you slip out of its normal rhythms: “Day is night, right is wrong / Love is all, love is evil”. There are lots of songs about love, but when’s the last time you heard someone say love is evil, while acknowledging that it’s also all-important? (Oh, right, sorry, it was this year. Dammit, Adrianne! You’re ruining my argument.) Or how about this all-timer: “Please forgive me / for stuff I didn’t do.”
Okay, I think all this stuff about love / evil works as a great segue into Sean Lennon.
The greatest contradiction on Friendly Fire by Sean Lennon (2006) is how something so profoundly shaped by nepotism could be this good. Sorry, only kidding. I really do love this album.
But seriously, how else would he have had the connections to film an entire set of lavishly-produced music videos—supposedly on a shoestring budget, if this interview is to be believed. This sort of thing doesn’t just magically appear without calling in some favors! Check out this one (above). It has period costumes and everything. Are they in Italy or Mexico?
Unfortunately for me and my personal social reform agenda, I love this stuff. Seriously, go watch those music videos, they’re just awesome. I also don’t think anyone is going to have the budget to do anything like this again any time soon. But imagine what could be if bands/artists had the the funds (and the vision) to do this sort of thing…
OK, let’s get into the music, though. Pretty bold to open your album with the words “Dead meat / Don’t you know you’re dead meat”. Pretty cool, though! It goes with the baroqueness of the music in a beautiful way—it’s very Don Juan (and so is the video, which features swordfighting! Come on, watch it already). Jon Brion did the string arrangements, and if I’m reading the credits right, some of the drum fills (if I ever make it as a producer, I want to be credited with the drum fills), and a few other LA heavyweights were involved, including, crucially, Matt Chamberlain on drums. There’s something incredibly cool, and again, kind of baroque, about the interlocking rhythm between Matt’s drumming and Sean’s acoustic guitar playing—according to an interview, those were the first two elements to go down, and you can hear how the rest of the album was built up from that rock-solid core. If there’s any argument to be made that drummers should learn their rudiments, it should be so that they can play the tasty 6/8 part in “Dead Meat”.
Why am I throwing this album in here with the other two? Mainly because of one line in the Pitchfork review that continues to haunt me. Here, I’ll print it, and award it some undue attention:
“On the opening invective "Dead Meat", Lennon sounds like he's pouring his spiteful thoughts ("you just messed with the wrong team," "you get what you deserve") into a carefully worded e-mail when he should be growling them in your face.”
Ah, right, because when you say something angry in a song, you’d better get angry! Make sure that your delivery always matches the content of what you’re saying, otherwise you might accidentally end up with some subtlety—or god forbid, irony—in your writing.
And sure, that might be true, if you’re an actor (remember what Phoenix said about actors!). But in songs the rules of engagement are different. You can slip things by the filters. What’s interesting about what Sean is doing here, like with Phoenix and TWBA, is that the spitefulness is contained. There’s something more powerful to me, ultimately, about the kind of message that you have to find yourself as a listener. If you put this song on in the background, you might not hear the lyrics at all. Or you might hear “Dead meat” and go, huh? And then it’s won your engagement without having to hit you over the head with an overwrought performance. That said, I’m not sure this song succeeds in having something interesting to say beyond the implied story of the classical jealous lover, or whatever. But! Paired with the music video, which clearly has a lot of intention behind it (considering that all of the music videos together comprise a short film with a bit of a storyline), if you take the two together as a whole work, it’s interesting given the aggressive-sounding lyrics that Sean casts himself as the loser of the duel, whose angry disposition leads him to pick a fight he can’t win. I think without that bit of context, the song indeed doesn’t quite work, but with it, it’s pretty strong. As for the vocal performance, instead of some variant of hyper-masculine growl of the kind that Kurt Cobain both patented and later found himself completely at odds with, we get a sense that the protagonist’s anger is just barely contained, which leaves up to our imagination just how angry he might be.
Above: The best song on the album is this Marc Bolan cover. The rest of the songs are also amazing imo, but this recording truly enters the sublime, doesn’t it?
Throughout the album there seems to be this idea that jealousy/envy is pathological, that the fundamental problem of desire—how having something is not as good as wanting it—is inescapable, and it drives the protagonist mad (in the music video, mad enough to be murderous!). There are some zingers here that are delivered completely deadpan, which I think again makes them all the more effective, not less, like this one on “Spectacle”: “…You told me this / That wickedness is a myth / That was invented for losers”. You might not catch it on the first listen (well, unless you read my blog), but on the third or fourth, you’ll be like, huh? And then the door is open for you to actually engage with it.
I do understand how this sort of thing would put people off if you’re not in on the central conceit that this is a truly baroque album, and it’s sort of casting the song’s hero as a character in, say, Don Giovanni. But if you can see it that way instead of just Sean himself complaining about an ex-lover or whatever the Pitchfork guy was saying, I think it really works.
Alright, I think we’re getting to the end here. I want to mention the melodies, just because I think they’re amazing. I’m reluctant to say Beatles because of the obvious association, but these songs really are about the closest you can get to the angular melodies on, say, Revolver or Rubber Soul, outside of actually listening to those albums. And the other obvious comparison is Elliott Smith. I think Sean might be even better with melody, controversially enough, especially if you happen to like angular melodies that jump around a lot. And he often concludes things in a way that I find very classically satisfying (there a lot of V-Is on Friendly Fire, I guess you could say), which as I often write about on here I sometimes feel is a dying art. The prevailing consensus seems to be that leaving people hanging harmonically is a cool and modern thing to do, but I think bringing things home in a way that doesn’t feel contrived takes arguably more skill and in today’s musical landscape at least that feels rarer and maybe a bit more worthy right now (it feels to me like every song nowadays wants to never resolve anything, harmonically).
There you have it, that’s my three-album review. The general takeaway is that I like it when songwriters are actually good. Sorry, I meant to say subtle. Basically: it’s important to have the conceal in there with the reveal, OK? If you’ve ever wondered why I have such strong opinions about how songwriting “should be” done, I think this is pretty much the ground floor of where it all started.
I also want to say that I think it really says something about Americans that when a bunch of Germans and a Norwegian started a white guy funk band, they called it (self-deprecatingly) The Whitest Boy Alive, whereas when a bunch of midwestern guys started a white guy funk band, they named it a bastardized German word for “wolf pack.”
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Thanks for reading! Next week I think I’ll get back to “NEW MUSIC.” Do you have any new music to recommend me? Please send it my way. OK, peace. This was a fun one.
Though there could certainly be an element of that, too. I think both are happening, simultaneously. After all, during a breakup surely you go through a period of questioning everything and interrogating the influences that made you who you are?